Alan Moore Gets Psychogeographical With Unearthing

In his new multimedia box set, Unearthing, Moore explores the magical mind of fellow British comic book writer Steve Moore (no relation) through the geography of his subject’s hometown district, Shooter’s Hill in London.

“We all grow out of the environment and times which we are born into,” Alan Moore said by phone from his home in Northampton, England, ahead of Monday’s release of Unearthing. “They have an influence upon us. I’m not sure the position of remote astrological constellations has any influence on us, although I’m open to opinions on that. But the place and time from which we emerge shapes all of us.”

Thanks to dense tomes like Watchmen, From Hell, Lost Girls and others you should have read by now, Alan Moore has become a comics supernova well-known for words that deeply explore our own cosmological and Earth-based labyrinths. To tell the story of his frequent collaborator Steve Moore, Unearthing contains photography by Mitch Jenkins and musical atmospherics from Doseone, Fog, Mike Patton and Mogwai’s Stuart Brathwaite that back up the Watchmen writer’s spoken-word performance.

Alan Moore spoke with Wired.com at length about Unearthing, psychogeography, Second Life, the latest news in the long-running Watchmen rights controversy and his new dirty-minded H.P. Lovecraft comic Neonomicon (out this month from Avatar Press), all in an engaging conversation conducted in what the influential writer calls his “regionally accented midland slur.”

Wired.com: The music on Unearthing makes for great soundtracking, but you have the perfect voice for spoken word. Did you have any anxiety being heard through your voice rather than read through your pen?

Alan Moore: While I have primarily been known for all of my published works over the past 25 years or whatever, there has never been a time when I’ve not been doing performance work. When I started out with the Northampton Arts Lab back when I was a teenager, I was initially doing poetry reading, performance work and trying to find ways to actually make these things more palatable to the listener.

Very early on when I was a teenager, I learned that rhythm has got an awful lot to do with it. I found that if you can write to a suitable cadence, the audience would be very giving even if the poem itself wasn’t actually saying anything. Later I realized that it might be a good idea to use the same rhythmic technique but with actual material with importance or relevance, and this didn’t just apply to spoken word. When the reader is engaged with a printed text, they are creating a rhythm in their heads, if there is a rhythm there. So all of my stuff has paid probably too much attention to the actual rhythm of the words.

When it came round to Uneathing, which was originally intended as a printed text in Iain Sinclair’s lovely London: City of Disappearances anthology, it was never really meant to be read aloud and certainly not to turn into the massive event that it was to become. But there was an incredible attention to the rhythm of the piece. So I wasn’t too worried about the performance on Unearthing. We could always do another take if I flubbed a word or something.

I was doing for a number of years these one-off magical performances, some of which survive on CD, where I’d perform live with music, dancers or other spectacle. In some ways doing this stuff is a new experience. There are a lot of things about it that are very different from the way that I have previously worked. In some ways, it’s just like coming home. This is the home to the underground; literally, when we perform in the catacombs. [Unearthing was performed live in abandoned railway tunnels beneath London’s Waterloo Station.] You can’t get much more underground than that.

Moore: That was the snappy name that we were performing under, my musical partner Tim Perkins and David J from Bauhaus and Love and Rockets. For about six or seven years, we were doing those infrequent one-off performances in areas that we would research the area beforehand.

That’s how we found out about the legendary record producer Joe Meek — who helped perfect modern recording technique but then shot his landlady and then himself — when doing our show in The Highbury Working. He probably provided much of the template of Phil Spector’s later career. Of course, there was Samuel Taylor Coleridge, wandering down Holloway Road and having a minder pull him out of chemists’ shops. The shows were a wonderful way to find out things about the area, and the specific dates they were being performed as well.

Unearthing is a similar piece of psychogeography. When Iain Sinclair, who at least in my opinion is the boss of psychogeography, asked me to contribute to his anthology, the brief was that I should write about something that had disappeared, is disappearing or would disappear, somewhere within the confines of London.

And I started to think about Steve Moore, who is a unique individual, the last of his line — although he is still in fine health, to be realistic, although none of us are going to live forever. And I thought that when Steve had disappeared it was important that a record of his very unusual life should be left behind by one of the people who knew him well enough to tell it. Because Steve has lived all of his life in the same house on top of a hill overlooking London, and in fact to this day sleeps five or six paces away from the spot where he was born, then the place that Steve has lived all of his life became as much of a character in the story as Steve himself.

So I started to research Shooter’s Hill, the environment in which he has always lived … which is a very unusual hill. Millions of years ago, a chalk fault [on] the north side of the hill collapsed, and formed the entire Thames Valley, without which there would be no river Thames, without which there would be no London.

Wired.com: Which is a pretty powerful birth metaphor, if you’re on the hunt for one.

Moore: It said to me that London was all a kind of dream that Shooter’s Hill was having. It dreamed London up, you know? So yeah, Unearthing‘s very much about the connections that exists between people and their landscapes.

But it was a very odd story, and Steve and I were both surprised when we found it being taken up by the photographer Mitch Jenkins, who wanted to turn it into a photonarrative. Then Mitch had talked to the people at Lex, who had lined up this mouthwatering array of talent who you wouldn’t expect find on the same album together. But they were perfect at coming up with a soundscape to actually set everything against. But it was very different from the process of working with Tim and David J.

Once the music was written to vague explanatory notes, I would sit down with a stopwatch and time when the music changes happened in the performance. Then I would write the words to fit with the music, so the dramatic points in the writing would coincide with it.

But on Unearthing, we did it the other way around. The various musicians heard the monotonous two-hour tape of me reading the piece in my regionally accented midland slur, and they built the music around my voice. So it’s a completely different way of working. But the results sound every bit as intriguing, and the music is fantastic. It’s atmospherically perfect for the kind of thing I was trying to convey.

Wired.com: Were you a fan of any of these bands before? Because they knew you. Mogwai’s Stuart Brathwaite said you were his favorite comic writer of all time.

Moore: I knew of Mogwai, I knew of Justin Broadrick’s work in Napalm Death and Godflesh. I think I’ve got that right, though I’ll probably turn out to be embarrassingly wrong. I knew of Mike Patton, of course, from Faith No More and his many interesting side projects. My son-in-law John Reppion got me a copy of Patton’s Fantomas project, which I thought was tremendous. I wasn’t familiar with either Doseone or Fog before I heard the stuff they had done, and the same is true of Zach Hill of Hella. But it all goes together so seamlessly that it’s kind of difficult to imagine that these musicians who were working in isolation could tie it all together.

Wired.com: I think they’re all Alan Moore psychogeographers, if you will.

Moore: That seems to be the case. They’ve never visited Shooter’s Hill, or know Steve Moore, so they were able to get it entirely from the text and my reading.

Wired.com: Speaking of psychogeography, what do you think of our current connections to our regional locations?

Moore: Well, I think that we need mythology. We need a bedrock of story and legend in order to live our lives coherently. I think that in the past a lot of our monotheistic religions have provided that, but that has become increasingly problematic throughout the 20th and 21st century so far. There’s a lot of luggage that comes with those beliefs, and there has been a lot to erode them. And that has left people completely disconnected from any sense of place and history. And I think our personhood: We define ourselves by our surroundings and our situations. If you are brought up in a neighborhood that resembles a rat trap, pretty soon you are going to come to the conclusion that you are probably a rat. If on the other hand you have got to the tool of psychogeography — or poetry, to give it a less trendy and more accessible name — then you can look at the ordinary world around you with the eye of a poet. Finding events which rhyme with other events, what little coincidences or connections can be drawn to these places and people. You can put them into an arrangement that says something new about them.

Wired.com: Remixing reality, so to speak.

Moore: Let’s stick with Einstein and Hawking: Time and space are pretty much space-time. They’re entangled. You can’t separate time and space. I don’t think you can separate time and place. I don’t think you can separate a place from its history. I think a place is much more than the bricks and mortar that go into its construction. I think it’s more than the accidental topography of the ground it stands on. These are important factors, but surely the most important factors about any place or person is what they have been. Their helps to tell you what they mean. If you have that kind of insight into the tawdry and debased streets in which most of us spend our lives, then instead of walking down a rat trap you are walking through cataclysmic history, from your personal memories to the local legends. Then the rat trap becomes a fable, a mythological landscape. And just as living in rat trap will give you the impression you live in a rat trap, then l suspect that living in a mythological landscape might after a while give you the subliminal impression that you are at least a mythological figure. A heroic character in your own narrative. I think it would be better if we felt like that rather than victims of our environment. That would empower us, and put some genuine energy back into the streets in which we live.

The fourth issue of Moore's indie zine Dodgem Logic thinks global but creates local.Image courtesy Top Shelf ProductionsWired.com: That seems to be an aim of your recently launched underground magazine, Dodgem Logic, which features the clever individuals in your Northampton hood, as well as those outside of it.

Moore: It’s available worldwide through various distributors, but it is a local magazine. And it is trying to do something about the place in which I live, which is pretty much like a lot of places in the Western world right now, and especially like a lot of places in Britain. In that half the street is boarded up because of the recession. It is a kind of tumbleweed territory where there used to be thriving commerce. So I think it’s about time that we forgot about globalism. Yes, we do live on the same planet and we have to think in terms of a global environment. But that is all beginning to come to bits, whether for financial or environmental reasons. It is time to switch to a vision of localism. We should pay attention to the environments that immediately surround us, and the people that populate those environments. We should take care of what we got. Because it’s all well and good to be a global thinker. But if that tapestry is beginning to unravel, then it is not the time to stand back and appreciate its grand design. It is time to pay attention to the individual stitches. They are the things that are unraveling, and will unravel the whole thing if left unattended. Appreciate what’s around you. This is an incredible world, with all sorts of incredible information. Appreciating that would lead to a richer experience for most people.

Wired.com: Do you think the internet and social networking has problematized that philosophy? Technology has brought us all tremendous connectivity, but it also has seemed to simultaneously depersonalize us further from each other.

Moore: Well, that is true. I’m not personally connected to the internet, although nearly everyone that I know is, and many of them have a great time and no problems with it. And on the surface you can see that the internet could go an awful long way to educating, enlightening, informing and connecting the world. But as you say, sitting there at a screen in your room, with your empty pizza boxes and failing eyesight, that is ultimately alienating and isolating. You’ve got a lot of onscreen contact with a load of people that you may never meet or know, in any other sense than responding to their latest bulletin. It has shown a great capacity to alienate people. It amazes and perturbs me when I hear about things like Second Life, which I believe actually has its own exchange rate called Linden Dollars. And I also believe there has been at least one case where somebody had stolen someone else’s very expensive space station in Second Life — because you can’t do that — which so angered the space station’s owner that he decided to go and end the other player’s First Life. This is an unusual interface.

Wired.com: That’s a nicely Wired way of putting it.

Moore: I think that First Life is better than Second Life! [Laughs] We haven’t got this life fathomed yet. I suspect that this is not the time to escape into a pixelated utopia. However nice the pastel colors might appear, your physical body is probably atrophying while you’re dancing with pixies.

Moore created comics' most storied series Watchmen with artist Dave Gibbons, but doesn't own a copy anymore.Image courtesy DC Comics

Wired.com: Let’s teleport to comics, and comics conventions. I noticed that you did not make Comic-Con International this year, but tons of blockbuster films did.

Moore: When I used to go to them, they were purely put on by comics enthusiasts. The first one I attended in London had probably a hundred people who really loved comics and were amazed to find 99 other people who felt the same way. This was too small a group for any of the publishers to bother having a presence at the convention. And [the conventions] were much, much better for it. I’m pretty much out of comics now. My distaste for the comics industry is … I really want nothing to do with that. So yeah, the comics conventions are right out. In fact, I think this week they offered me the rights to Watchmen back if I would agree to some dopey prequels and sequels. So I just said that if they had said that 10 years ago or so when I had asked them for that, then yeah it might have worked. But these days I don’t want Watchmen back. Certainly I don’t want it back under those kinds of terms. I don’t even have a copy of it in the house anymore.

Wired.com: Wow.

Moore: The comics world has got such a lot of unpleasant connections, when I think back over it, many of them to do with Watchmen. [Laughs] So the conventions these days are like trade fairs where the publishers have got their target audience in a space and can get that audience to pay to be advertised to. Comic-Con is not in the cards for me in the future.

Moore: Funnily enough, that is one of the most unpleasant things I have ever written. It was just at the time when I finally parted company with DC Comics over something dreadful that happened around the Watchmen film. Kevin and I found that we were having some hiccups in our payments, after storming out of DC. I had a tax bill coming up, and I needed some money quickly. So I happened to be talking to William from Avatar, and he suggested that he could provide some if I was up for doing a four-part series, so I did.

Dive into H.P. Lovecraft and Alan Moore's dark side with Neonomicon, out this month.Image courtesy Avatar Press

Wired.com: What was the plan?

Moore: He said I could do whatever I wanted, and I had always wanted to pick up some of the plot threads from the short H.P. Lovecraft story I had previously written called The Courtyard. It was adapted as a comic strip for Avatar, and I thought it worked pretty well. They kept to my original text, and it was an intelligent adaptation. There was something interesting about that story. It was a modernization of Lovecraft. It wasn’t a kind of strictly by-the-book pastiche, the way that a lot of Lovecraftian fiction tends to be. So although I took it to pay off the tax bill, I’m always going to make sure I try and make it the best possible story I can. With Neonomicon, because I was in a very misanthropic state due to all the problems we had been having, I probably wasn’t at my most cheery. So Neonomicon is very black, and I’m only using “black” to describe it because there isn’t a darker color.

Wired.com: How do you think it fits in with or stands out against other Lovecraftian work already out there?

Moore: It’s got all of the things that tend to be glossed over in Lovecraft: the racism, the suppressed sex. Lovecraft will refer to nameless rites that are obviously sexual, but he will never give them name. I put all that stuff back in. There is sexuality in this, quite violent sexuality which is very unpleasant. After a while of writing and reading it, I thought, “Hmmm, that was much too nasty; I shouldn’t have done that. I should have probably waited until I was in a better mood.” But when I saw what [artist] Jacen Burrows had done with it, I thought, “Actually, this is pretty good!” [Laughs] I wanted to go back and read through my scripts. And yes, it is every bit as unpleasant as I remember, but it’s quite good. I think it’s an unusual take on Lovecraft that might upset some aficionados. Or it might upset some perfectly ordinary human beings!